But before I went back to the apartment, back to the box, I dropped by the Golconda. Mostly because I wanted to see if it was open, even as I knew open was not quite the word. Clive was too busy laminating prototypes to offer me practical information such as hours of operation. Was it possible the answer was “always,” like a 24-hour drugstore that happened to charge $250,000 a prescription? I paced in front of the doors, trying to catch the attention of the security cameras. People were watching and so I pretended to be frustrated with my phone, to be aghast at imaginary incompetence. I found myself unable to stomach the idea of going back to our perpetually bright apartment right away, eating a bag of chips for dinner, testing the limit of the Chip Clip springs. I was midway through composing a text to Clive—Maybe less with the surrealism and more with the—when the doors clicked.
I moved quickly, letting the building shroud me in darkness. I nearly fell when a rat decided that the best means of avoiding me was to go directly over my shoe. When I got to the second door, Errol was there to greet me, enveloped in a lemon-scented particle cloud. It was confusing how someone who emitted so much charm had wound up lending his time and talents to Clive. Though I suppose everyone wound up serving Clive eventually, and in ways that broke the boundaries of him signing our paychecks. And that, he didn’t always do. At Modern Psychology, people were hesitant to badmouth him when he stiffed them. They chalked up an unpaid invoice to a misunderstanding, an accounting delay or Clive’s personal economic philosophy bleeding into his professional one. Paychecks were fantastic but surely they only made life better, not livable. And yet those in his orbit kept bringing him more—more partnerships, more funding, more cheap labor. They recognized too late that these services were not being offered, they were being extracted.
I doubted his behavior had improved. One look at the chandeliers, those constellations of overpriced incandescence, and it was clear that, if anything, it had gotten worse. I was accustomed to this cycle of Clive-pleasing abuse, having built up a tolerance over the years, escaping only when forced. When the magazine died, the life drained out of Clive’s clutches. But Errol was new to the fanaticism. You could see it in his eyes. I had to hand it to Clive: He no longer needed a vehicle for his cult of personality, he was the cult.
Errol embraced me with his free arm, holding me to his chest in one fluid motion. He was wearing navy pajamas with white piping. They had a sheen to them.
“Do you sleep here?” I asked, concerned.
“Do I sleep here? Do I sleep here? Such a comedian!”
He escorted me inside, where there were now two baristas and still no customers. The new barista was a doe-eyed girl with a messy bun. Blond hairs fell down the nape of her neck. She looked like she belonged in a field, reaching for a farmhouse. She, too, was wearing pajamas as she arranged straws in a jar while the first barista, the boy, offered her smitten words of encouragement.
“Stay here,” Errol instructed me.
“Woof.”
“Oh my God, ha.”
He disappeared behind a seamless door in the wall. In my periphery, I saw movement overhead. Several people passed above me, their long shadows extending across the marble floor. Behold, the conductors of my fate, milling about. It was good to see the place more populated, to hear voices. I stood on the tips of my toes. They looked at me, almost as if by accident, and then quickly looked away. From Clive’s description, I’d been expecting a mix of monks and celebrities. Phrases like “pyramid scheme” and “suppressive person” had been scuttling around my brain for days. But these people looked like a cross-section of any subway car. Except, perhaps, for the monochromatic pajamas. And the bowing.
There was a Black woman with a face full of freckles telling a story to a younger redheaded man, both of them sipping on coffee. They were laughing quietly. They split to allow a desultory woman with a crown of frizz to pass. She looked like she taught kindergarten. They all bowed to one another. I coughed, trying to get their attention. This achieved nothing. The baristas spoke in hushed tones and then the doe-eyed girl offered me an espresso.
“She doesn’t want any,” the boy whispered sharply.
“Like Jonestown with lattes!” I shouted at them.
The girl started giggling. An anemic woman in a turban was tending to the birds of paradise in the corner. Was it ego to assume these people would take an interest in me? How could they be so incurious about the subject of their own experiment? Perhaps for the same reason no one likes to befriend their food before they cook it.
Vadis materialized from the hallway, an iPad in the crook of her arm.
“Hey,” I said, moving my head back in surprise, “I didn’t know you were here.”
“I had work to do,” she said. “We’re launching a line of sleep masks.”
“Huh?”
“For my job job.”
“Ah, I almost forgot you had one of those. Is that why everyone is wearing pajamas? Market research?”
“Yeah, those are ours. They’re mulberry silk.”
I smiled, relieved. When I looked around again, the woman in the turban had vanished along with the other members.
“Where did they go?”
“Where did who go?”
“Please don’t make me feel crazier than I already feel.”
“They probably went to the meditation room.”
“May I see the meditation room?”
“You came back,” she said, moving on to the obvious.
“Why can’t I just see it?”
“Because it’s not for you, Nosey Pants.”
“I thought this whole shebang was for me.”
“It is. Trust us.”
“Oh, no, thank you.”
“Man,” she said, jumping to another train of thought while the first one was still moving, “you’re so lucky that Clive selected you. Lola, you’ve been chosen.”
“One could argue…” I said, motioning to the ceiling, to the sky beyond it.
“It’s like a romantic Minority Report,” Vadis decided. “You know, a SWAT team of cops and robot spiders that show up before you get into a bad relationship.”
“Am I in a bad relationship, according to you?”
“That’s not up to me.”
“But you guys are the cops.”
“Nah,” she said, taking my arm. “At best, we’re the robot spiders. Our members are welcome anytime to concentrate their energy. Between us, that part isn’t as effective as the more concrete elements, you know? But it will be.”
“You really believe in all this?”
“Umm, do I believe in a business model that will make us rich while helping people get over themselves? Do I believe it’s possible to apply energy toward spiritual rejuvenation? Umm, yeah. Clive’s a genius.”
“That’s a big word.”
“Six letters.”
“That’s a big word to throw at Clive Glenn. Have you forgotten who we’re talking about? Or maybe the blood rushes out of your brain when you bow to him like a lovesick geisha.”
“You’re so crotchety. This is why you need help. So who’d you see?”
Her eyes were like saucers but like flying ones. They darted around my face, searching for a good place to land. When I told her about Jonathan, she didn’t remember him. She seemed disappointed not to be able to appreciate the full extent of him.
“He must be from Clive’s list, from before I knew you.”
“You guys made lists?”
“Obviously.”
“Can I see the lists?”
“Do you think you can see the lists?”
She ushered me into an office that once belonged to a rabbi. There were two holes, set at an angle, inside the door frame. On the far wall, you could still make out the outline of framed degrees and in the middle was a matted photo of Clive’s Modern Psychology spread on Soren Jørgensen. Jørgensen is almost too tall for the page and looking uncomfortable dressed as a bellhop, standing in the elevator of an art deco hotel. The headline read: “Going Up? Connectivity and Higher Consciousness.” This is the elevator repairman, the Scandinavian colossus, whose “teachings” Clive had decided to emulate and sell.
On the opposite wall was an old map of the neighborhood featuring a blue stripe from when Canal had been a canal.
“Where?” asked Vadis.
There were three pins already, representing Amos, Willis, and Dave. I pointed. Vadis pressed in a new pin.
“I feel like we’re linking a crime spree,” I said.
The Korean woman in the white tunic I’d seen the other day was stationed on the far side of the room, wearing headphones around her neck. She was manning a horseshoe configuration of screens, meters, and external drives, a shrunken city of cubes with oblong lights. Beside her was a pile of cassette tapes and a manual. There was also a device that looked like a polygraph test except this one was circular, like a motion-activated toilet seat. Vadis introduced me to the woman, Jin, who asked me to lick a suction cup.
“Just the one,” Jin clarified, offering it to me. “Don’t worry, we’re not going to ply you with electrodes. This is to monitor your biofeedback. Better your spit than mine.”
I leaned forward and licked the rubber with my tongue while it was still in her hand, coming to it like a horse. She scrunched up her face.
“I was going to hand it to you.”
I granted Jin permission to reach up my shirt. Her hands were cold as she taped wires to my wrists, cutting the tape before it covered too much arm hair. She clipped two pulse monitors to the fingers on my left hand.
“Where’s Clive?” I asked, trying to sound casual.
I didn’t want to see Clive. But I did want to know if he was leering at us from behind a two-way mirror.
“Chantal emergency,” Vadis said.
“What happened, she get an eyebrow pencil stuck up her ass?”
Jin stifled a laugh but gathered herself. Clive was her leader. Best not to trash the boss’s girlfriend in his temple.
“Shall we begin?” asked Vadis.
They took turns asking me questions, which were surprising in number and arbitrary in nature. If the objective was to get me exasperated enough to produce uninhibited answers, it worked. Jin turned a few dials. I had to confirm where I was born, my profession, political affiliation, any allergies, the last book I read, aisle or window, right or left side of the bed, an item of clothing I regret purchasing, an item of clothing I regret not purchasing, my astrological sign, my rising sign …
“I’m a Virgo too,” Jin interjected, which struck me as unprofessional.
That I now thought of this enterprise as professional enough to break its own rules was disconcerting.
“I don’t put stock in astrology,” said Vadis.
“You always say I’m judgmental because I’m a Virgo.”
“No, I don’t. Maybe imagined conversations are a Virgo thing.”
“Hold still please,” instructed Jin. “And when was the first time you called nine-one-one?”
“What does any of this have to do with Jonathan?”
The paper on the circular polygraph was waiting to be scribbled on.
“She’s trying to open up your MPs,” Vadis explained. “Memory Pathways.”
“When I first moved to New York,” I relented, “I was going down the escalator to the subway and this kid behind me had one of those black plastic deli bags and it looked like it had batteries in it. And he left it on the escalator and then ran back up. I called nine-one-one but nothing happened.”
“What was his nationality?” asked Jin.
“Is punk a nationality?”
“She means what was the color of his skin.”
“Oh, is that what she means? Brown. His skin was brown.”
“The first time I called nine-one-one,” Jin said, “I was eleven. My father stabbed my sister in the thigh with a hunting knife and hanged himself in the garage.”
I looked at Vadis, who shook her head. I was starting to sweat off the suction cup. But then the lights on the boxes began to blink, like a modem waking up.
“Here we go,” Jin spoke to her machines.
“When was the last time you thought about Jonathan?” Vadis asked.
I sat back in my chair.
“Prior to tonight?”
“Yes,” said Vadis, “prior to tonight.”
If they’d asked me straightforward questions, I might not have had access to the information. Terrorist suspects experience a version of this kind of inquisition. I knew because I’d interviewed a slew of military psychologists for a Modern Psychology feature about how their tactics could be broken down to help people. “Watered Down Water Boarding.” People pulled their subscriptions. Former detainees spoke out. Zach was apoplectic at having to take the side of the military and threatened to quit. Clive dedicated his editor’s letter to issuing an apology. All this happened before the dawn of Twitter, which could explain why, to this day, people were still willing to give him money.
“I probably think about him all the time without thinking about him.”
“How so?” asked Jin.
“I guess it’s just the same way if you saw Indiana missing from a map of America, you’d be like, ‘That’s an incomplete map of America,’ without missing Indiana in any real way.”
“That makes sense,” Jin said, encouragingly. “But have there been any triggers?”
“When I see people with quotes tattooed on their shoulders.”
“What about quotes other places?”
“No,” I said, “not then.”
“What about single words?”
“I think it has to be the whole sentence.”
“Hmmm,” said Jin, adjusting a knob. “And when was the last time you thought about him in a concentrated way?”
“As in prolonged?”
“More as in voluntary. Without outside stimuli.”
“Is there any other kind?”
“Lola,” Vadis groaned, “were you listening to a word Clive said?”
“No?”
Jin turned her attention to one of her screens and began clicking a mouse. I tried to peer over to see the screen but she angled the monitor toward her.
“I guess never, then. I never think about him on purpose.”
“Were you ever in love with this ‘Jonathan’?” Vadis asked.
She was still irritated that she had never heard of him.
“It was college. I loved ska and wine coolers.”
“Did you ever tell him you loved him?”
“No.”
“And did he ever tell you he loved you?”
“No.”
“But did he love you?”
“Yes.”
“And you knew about this discrepancy when you were together?”
“Yes.”
“Starting when?”
“Within five minutes of meeting him.”
I gulped. My Memory Pathways were bringing me unwelcome feelings.
“But you stayed out of insecurity.”
“I stayed out of hope.”
The needle moved so fitfully over the paper, I thought it might rip.
“I was scared Jonathan would be it. I sort of always think a guy will be it.”
“As in ‘the one’?”
“No, as in an endangered species. I’m sorry if that sounds pathetic, I’m sure it does. But it’s where monogamy comes from and no one thinks monogamy sounds pathetic.”
“Is this a source of shame?” Jin asked. “That you didn’t love him but kept dating?”
I thought not of Jonathan, but of other men who’d cared for me. And whom I’d hurt. Especially when none of us had a clue what we were doing. They signed their emails telling me they couldn’t wait to hold me, or how they wanted to make me deliriously happy. Not just happy, deliriously so. They sent me sweet texts so I’d have sweet texts to wake up to. None of it meant that I was obliged to love them back. But it did mean I was obliged not to torture them with indecision.
“No,” I lied, but quickly surrendered to the needle. “Okay, yes. But I would like to address the shame. I didn’t throw Jonathan away because he was nice to me. You know, when you’re younger, you worry that maybe no one will ever love you and that fear makes you do some dumb shit. What you don’t know is that fear has nothing on the fear of not being capable of loving someone in return.”
“Final question,” said Jin, more entranced with her data than with me.
“Great!”
I clapped my hands together. Jin winced at the sound reverberating in her ears.
“At any moment during your interaction with Jonathan this evening, did you sense that you should’ve tried even harder to make that relationship work?”
“Everyone feels like if only they had been more or less tolerant, if they could commit to a version of themselves, they could be with anyone they’d ever dated.”
“Umm,” Vadis said, “no one thinks that.”
“Then they’re not thinking about it hard enough. Romance without practicality is a fling. Love is agreeing to live in someone else’s narrative.”
“Dark,” Vadis decided.
“Are you supposed to pipe in this much?”
She raised her palms in the air, unhanding the conversation.
“This is insane. Not this. Though yes, this. Just this whole line of questioning. We’re supposed to think we break up with people because we know who we are and the other person wasn’t going to fit. It’s why you get all this postmortem feedback after you’ve been dumped, about how the dumper is incapable of having a relationship. Like literally incapable. As if any of us are in a position to assess someone else’s capacity to love. Meanwhile, somewhere across town, that person’s therapist and friends and family and whoever are confirming the many ways in which you were wrong for him. A medical doctor is telling some bozo that he took the only choice he had. So not only is he not broken or stunted or missing the gene, noooo, he is to be commended for his self-knowledge. How else would he have made the excellent decision to get rid of you? But what happens next, when time passes and he’s in a new relationship and he thinks it’s going great but then boom: he’s the one getting dumped? Is it because he’s flawed and the other person made an excellent decision?”
“No?” guessed Jin.
“No!” I shouted. “It’s because the person who dumped him was incapable. Someone always has to be the broken or immoral one. Maybe we get less terrible about assigning blame as we get older, I don’t know. Maybe we learn to retain who we are better instead of giving it all away to a stranger. People do cut their losses, shake hands on it. But no breakup, even an okay one, is complete until you dig like a pair of truffle-sniffing pigs to find out what happened. This is how romantic love keeps itself from going extinct, right? How it swindles itself into sentience. Romance may be the world’s oldest cult. It hooks you when you’re vulnerable, holds your deepest fears as collateral, renames you something like ‘baby,’ brainwashes you, then makes you think that your soul will wither and die if you let go of a person who loved you. So you better have a good goddamn reason for saying ‘nah, not enough.’ The love lobby is worse than the gun lobby. More misery, more addiction, more heads on spikes. And for what?”
“Fucking hell, Lola.”
“I’m serious. For what?”
Jin cleaned her glasses on her pajama sleeve. Vadis bulged her eyes. She was trying to signal that my point had nowhere to land, not in this building, not with this audience. But my point was hers. She had eschewed romance the entire time I’d known her, but I was obliged to believe simply because I’d already put in the effort?
“All love is, is the process of deciding on familiarity.”
“Oh, yeah?” she huffed, whirling her finger around the map. “Then why is this working?”
“Because I’m not concussed! I remember these guys and they remember me. I didn’t make the rules. Maybe Clive should’ve put me on a plane to Tokyo.”
I took a deep breath. I could hear the sound of the needle’s tireless scratching. Jin twisted several knobs, clicking them off, and the whirring of the machines came to a halt.
“I don’t know,” I gave in, “maybe a perfect relationship is just on the tip of my tongue. That’s a clinical phenomenon, you know. It’s metacognition. You become momentarily conscious of your synapses firing.”
“I wrote the metacognition piece,” said Vadis.
“You did? That was a good piece.”
“Thanks.”
“So this is it?” I asked, rubbing my temples. “I come here every night and bludgeon these gentlemen with analysis until I am cured of indecision?”
“That’s closure,” said Vadis.
I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling. Someone had done a poor job of repainting it. I could see where the roller of fresh paint had bumped against the wall.
“Men,” I said, plunking my chair to the floor. “I can never decide if I forgive them too easily or punish them too easily. My whole life, I’ve never known.”
I flicked the monitors from my fingers and tugged off the suction cup.
“Where do I put these?”
“Anywhere you want,” said Jin.